The GENES Blog (GEnealogy News and EventS): Top stories concerning ancestral research in Britain, Ireland, and their diasporas, from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit The GENES Blog if you do so. To contact me please email chrismpaton @ outlook.com.

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Tuesday, 17 May 2016

Historic mental health institutions in Scotland resources

The Scottish Indexes website, run by Graham and Emma Maxwell, has added a new dedicated page detailing known mental health institutions, and the locations of records (some of which they are indexing), which may help with your research.

From the site:

Over the past few centuries, many mental health institutions have operated in Scotland. It is relatively easy to find information regarding the large public asylums. Many smaller institutions also existed, some of which had only a few private patients. We aim to include as many of these as possible as we expand these pages. For the moment, the pages contain details of all licensed institutions operating when the 1857 report of the Royal Lunacy Commission was being prepared. The commission visited each licensed institution in Scotland, and the appendices of the report contain accounts of each of their visits, the text of which is to be found in these pages. We have also added pages for some other institutions which operated prior to 1857, and which opened later, but many still need to be added. We hope this serves as a starting point.